Related papers: A Mean-Field Model for Active Plastic Flow of Epit…
Branching morphogenesis generates epithelial trees which facilitate gas exchange, filtering, as well as secretion processes with their large surface to volume ratio. In this review, we focus on the developmental mechanisms that control the…
Biological cells sense and respond to mechanical forces, but how such a mechanosensing proccess takes place in a nonlinear inhomogeneous fibrous matrix remains unknown. We show that cells in a fibrous matrix induce deformation fields that…
Cells self-organize into functional, ordered structures during tissue morphogenesis, a process that is evocative of colloidal self-assembly into engineered soft materials. Understanding how inter-cellular mechanical interactions may drive…
Collective cell migration is crucial in many biological processes such as wound healing, tissue morphogenesis, and tumor progression. The leading front of a collective migrating epithelial cell layer often destabilizes into multicellular…
Understanding mechanosensitivity, i.e. how cells sense the stiffness of their environment is very important, yet there is a fundamental difficulty in understanding its mechanism: to measure an elastic modulus one requires two points of…
Morphogenesis, tissue regeneration and cancer invasion involve transitions in tissue morphology. These transitions, caused by collective cell migration (CCM), have been interpreted as active wetting/de-wetting transitions. This phenomenon…
How pattern and form are generated in a reproducible manner during embryogenesis remains poorly understood. Intestinal organoid morphogenesis involves a number of mechanochemical regulators, including cell-type specific cytoskeletal forces…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
Living soft tissues appear to promote the development and maintenance of a preferred mechanical state within a defined tolerance around a so-called set-point. This phenomenon is often referred to as mechanical homeostasis. In contradiction…
During embryonic morphogenesis, tissues undergo dramatic deformations in order to form functional organs. Similarly, in adult animals, living cells and tissues are continually subjected to forces and deformations. Therefore, the success of…
Many embryonic deformations during development are the global result of local cell shape changes and other local active cell sheet deformations. Morphogenesis does not only therefore rely on the ability of the tissue to produce these active…
The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…
We consider a noise driven network of integrate-and-fire neurons. The network evolves as result of the activities of the neurons following spike-timing-dependent plasticity rules. We apply a self-consistent mean-field theory to the system…
Cell proliferation, apoptosis, and myosin-dependent contraction can generate elastic stress and strain in living tissues, which may be dissipated by internal rearrangement through cell topological transition and cytoskeletal reorganization.…
Recent experimental investigations into Hydra regeneration revealed a remarkable phenomenon: the morphological transformation of a tissue fragment from the incipient spherical configuration to a tube-like structure - the hallmark of a…
Understanding how biomechanical reorganization governs key biological processes, such as morphogenesis and development, requires predictive insights into stress distributions and cellular behavior. While traditional approaches focused on…
As the cover of embryos and adult organisms, epithelial tissues are subjected to substantial mechanical forces in tissue morphogenesis. However, the finite deformation behaviors of epithelial tissues remain largely unexplored. This study…
Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the…
T cells use sophisticated shape dynamics (morphodynamics) to migrate towards and neutralise infected and cancerous cells. However, there is limited quantitative understanding of the migration process in 3D extracellular matrices (ECMs) and…
Morphological instabilities of growing tissues that impinge on passive materials are typical of invasive cancers. To explain these instabilities in experiments on breast epithelial spheroids in an extracellular matrix, we develop a…